For those of you like me who reside outside of the Mormon corridor and were unable to make it to Logan for last night’s annual Leonard J. Arrington lecture, head on over to Life on Gold Plates for Blair Hodges’s notes on the presentation from Susan Arrington Madsen and Carl Arrington. Here’s a preview to entice you:

Susan: ?Some of you here tonight remember that for a period of time in 2001 and 2002 there was a controversy about the contents of Leonard?s archival collection housed at Utah State University. Representatives of the LDS Church requested that certain papers given to Leonard when he was church historian be returned to the church and that small, sensitive portions of Leonard?s diary be removed before it was open to the public. In the course of our investigations the family determined that a small stack of papers, perhaps eight to ten inches high, had been given to Leonard to complete a research project he had been assigned by the First Presidency. After Leonard?s death, the church-owned papers had been inadvertently gathered up and transferred to USU along with tens of thousands of Leonard?s own papers. The family happily and voluntarily returned these papers to the church. Regarding the requested removal of some of Leonard?s diary entries, the family decided that it was best to remove nothing, and to leave the diary as Leonard had written it. Leonard?s archival collection including his diary is, as we speak, completely intact and available to be read in its entirety at USU?s Special Collections.?